Go-2-School Homepage

2008 was the second year in a row I art directed the MTV Video Music Awards. For the creative direction of the 2008 VMAs, MTV was to 'take over' the entirety of the Paramount stages.  For the purposes of art direction this was separated into two categories - interior of stage 15 and exterior performances in the backlot and surrounding locations.  My job as the art director on this project was to communicate the musician's creative vision (in this case, Pink and the Jonas Brothers), the production designer's general vision, and translate both to visual references, storyboard illustrations and working drawings for the scenic departments to build from.  From SketchUp I built a model, exported multiple storyboards through the use of Quicktime video and exported CAD files for working build drawings.

[to see the final production, check out this link of Pink's performance]

Sidenote: A backlot on any sound stage in Los Angeles is the fake city.  These fake cities are super useful to many, many productions that film in Los Angeles -  commercials, sitcoms and movies all use these fake cities to 'shoot' quick exterior's of the city-du-jour in their story.

Getting Started
As a general rule in my everyday workflow using google sketchup, I typically get a pre-existing site plan in many different formats.  Believe me, I've worked from napkins and imported them eventually as .dwgs.  Fortunately for me on this occasion, the guys over at Paramount provided me with a drawn CAD ground plan of the intertwining, phony New York, Chicago, and financial district. As you know, CAD imports easily into SketchUp, so getting the model started was relatively easy.

Two days later, armed with a cup of coffee, oatmeal and my handy powershot camera, I simply walked through the backlot and snapped shots of each individual building.  I bet you can guess what i did next?  

You guessed it - I took my photos and my ground plan and elevated and detailed as much as I could of the entire 8 streets of fake city as I could. You see, in Hollywood there's a saying that couldn't be any more true:  "Hurry up and wait!" Once musical artists sign onto the show, I know my job will be hectic: Endless changes, revisions and such. Creative juices run free up until the last minute in Hollywood. But whenever I start a project like this, I use it to thoroughly prepare my SketchUp file using the plans and photos.  

Why SketchUp makes a difference
This process couldn't have been simpler with SketchUp.  Once the rough model was complete with organized layers in preperation for easy changes and additions, it was a cake walk to animate scenes and export CAD drawings to complete drafting packets for the scenic departments.  In the past, one would typically render all this by hand - starting from a sketch artist's illustration storyboard, and once approved, moving onto hand drafting the scenery discussed or even drafting the units in 2D in Vectorworks or the like.  Very time consuming. But with the SketchUp-based workflow, this process allowed for last minute changes and late decisions to be made without any anxiety or frustration on the art department's end.

Before Google SketchUp came into our lives, for a project like this one being created on a backlot- it would be hard for producers, executives, and musicians to visualize how their 'number' will look. But as an Art Director, I believe it's my job to manage creative information from the producers and 'talent', and recommunicate it clearly back to them and to the hard working people that build the final set. At this point in the project, it is usually a great time to describe all of the action using SketchUp's animation and shadow functions.

I can't precisely estimate the time and money that was saved using SketchUp to art direct these awards, but I can tell you this: Sketchup made the whole process much faster and incredibly more cost effective. As an art director, not only would I be focused on this work, but there are always numerous other meetings and other projects working in tandem that I have to keep up with. In pre-SketchUp days, all of the obligations would require me to hire an additional sketch artist for hand illustration storyboards and an additional set designer to help with the deluge of work.

Pulling it all together
Having already set the stage with my prebuilt soundstage exterior, it was easy for me to decorate the areas in streetfare, crowds, trash cans, occational moving scenery, etc.  What I didn't have time or energy to build myself, I easily found on the Google 3D Warehouse. What was even more super cool was that I could even play mini-director and set individual angles, camera pulls and suggested journeys using Scenes and the Walkthrough tool.  When it came time to design scenery for the Jonas Brothers and Pink it was fun and simple to put something quick together to show them.

After all of the work was done, I located Paramount Studios on Google Earth, imported the site onto my sketchup model, set my time and date for the exact shooting day and.... PRESTO!  It was simple to show the lighting director where the shadows from the buildings would land as well as prepare camera angles to avoid harsh sun reflections.  This is all very important business in Hollywood of course. Since the show was fed live to New York, you sort of want to keep the illusion that the West has similar sun patterns.  The general audience gets confused when it's dark outside but sunny on TV. Silly people.

Yo Pink, what do you think of this?!
I was proud - and scared as heck - to hold my laptop up to Pink while she was standing in front of the exact buildings I had mocked up in SketchUp and show her, along with the VP of MTV, what the producers were envisioning for that number.  They were so happy and not much changed from the original videos I created. It was also pretty freakin'  rad to hear the Jonas Brothers say, "wow, this is going to be our best performance ever. We don't want to change a thing.  We can't wait for this." Watching super celebrity musicians come to life and get excited about my videos was not only an incredible experience for me but even better when the network executives were as equally thrilled that a thorough job was well done.  To have a network executive's confidence is a real honor. Take a look at a few images below (all are SketchUp models with real photos mapped to the surfaces):

Thanks for reading, more later from the trenches of Hollywood.